It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve barely begun the process of overlooking my recent photographs from Utah and Colorado. I often have waves of contemplation as I peek through the snaps… in the calm and quiet setting of a controlled computer screen surrounded by walls and windows. No clock ticking, no car issues, no wind or weather… no glocks or bear sprays or indecisions. All the hard stuff is behind me, I made it without any hardships or accidents to camera equipment or myself. In general I would say I shoot about 50 gigs of photo’s a day while on such trips, which basically consists of shooting the dawn and morning sunrise till about 10 or 11:00am , maybe some afternoon lucky scouting snaps mixed with lunch on a hillside if conditions are favorable for such a thing and then I ramp it up at about 3:00pm till well into the dusk. That’s the routine. At 25 megs a RAW snap, that’s about 2000 snaps a day… if you break that down further, each snap might consist of multiple exposures and camera settings. A windy day for instance could affect a few extra snaps at High ISO settings to freeze things if my shutter speed is in question. Dusk and dawn images generally also have extra snaps for shadow detail files, if needed down the road. For the most part I would say I compose and snap for 1 frame and 95 percent of my images are exactly that. Composed in a way that there is no need for other snaps, but I still take the precaution of multiples considering all the work and time and money it takes to place myself and my camera in the path of these fleeting moments.
Let me get off the path for a moment, on the topic of locations and time well spent: During a recent morning at a quiet beaver pond near Keblers pass in Colorado another photographer showed up beside me in the dawn hours and we calmly talked for a moment about the clear blue skies that had befallen us on this particular day, great location….. not so great a sky for such a moment and place in time. Which was ok with me, it just had me dreaming of better days, maybe years from now perhaps when conditions might be more compelling for the subject, I was just happy I found the location that it could yield a good photograph someday. Anyway, he proceeded to tell me about the many “sky plates” he has and how he just shoots subjects in locations and puts other dramatic skies in the photograph with Photoshop. He was quite adamant about it and he was a professional photographer, whatever that means today, doing workshops and such. He called me a purist. Actually, he said, “What are you a purist?” in a harmless but slightly smuggish kinda way… I kind of liked the term…
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